Auto-enrolment passes 10m milestone

More than 10 million people have been brought into workplace pension saving through auto-enrolment, figures published by The Pensions Regulator show.

As of 31 January 2019, 10.003m people were automatically enrolled into a pension scheme, leading Amber Rudd, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to call auto-enrolment "an extraordinary success story".

According to the data, 11.46m employees were already active members of a scheme, and 438,000 had defined benefit or hybrid transitional arrangements applied to them.

This left 9.29m workers who did not fall into the previous categories, either because they were not saving into a scheme or were ineligible for auto-enrolment.

The figure includes around 4.8m self-employed people, who were excluded from the introduction of auto-enrolment.

In December 2018, the Government published its plans to trial pension savings for the self-employed, having found that only 32% are regularly saving for retirement.

Rudd added:

"We will be considering how we can reach even more people, with our ambition to bring in younger workers and enable everyone, particularly the self-employed, to save more."